Personnel


Board of Directors

Mark Rousseau - President
Mark Rousseau is a teacher at Richmond High School with over 15 years experience teaching English and the Media Arts.  He has been co-lead of the Multimedia Academy for the last 8 years and was one of the founders of Richmond Youth Media.


Susan Wittenberg – Vice President
Susan Wittenberg served as the Executive Director of the West Contra Costa Public Education Fund (The Ed. Fund) for 23 years until her retirement in 2007. For the past five years she has been a founding member of Building Blocks for Kids (BBK), a site-based collaborative focused on replicating the Harlem Children’s Zone model in the Iron Triangle in Richmond, and has been a Commissioner representing West County on the First 5 Contra Costa Commission. Susan is honored to serve as a member of the RYMP Board of Directors and particularly supports the idea that RYMP permits students to expand their vision of what’s possible for them beyond the limited geography of their school and community.


Jon Herbst - Treasurer
Jon Herbst is a Composer, Arranger, Producer, Music Editor and Jazz Pianist.  His scoring credits include Academy Award-winning documentaries, narrative films, PBS series, museum installations, educational CD ROMS, interactive media, commercials, corporate videos, and books on tape.
Jon has produced, engineered, edited and mixed countless studio and live sessions by vocalists, instrumentalists and voice-over artists.  These recordings have been featured in: CDs, Film, TV and Radio programs, Interactive Exhibits and Electronic Toys.
Jon owns and operates Coventry Studio, a digital recording facility in Kensington, CA.


Dr. Ben Davis - Secretary
Ben Davis, Ph.D. spent his academic career helping educational institutions contribute to building socially sustainable communities. His work is focused on improvisation as a key element in learning. He learned from experiences with the Blackstone Rangers, a Chicago South Side gang, from creating a community education undergraduate degree program in Wisconsin, and from serving learners and faculty as a dean and professor with the Union for Experimenting Colleges and Universities (myunion.edu), a consortium of over thirty colleges and universities which developed the University without Walls program. With RYMP, his focus is on promoting collaboration between school and community through the media arts.


Michele Jones Jackson, M.A.
Michele Jones Jackson grew up in the City of Richmond and graduated from El Cerrito High School in 1972. She received a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of San Francisco (USF) in Public Administration and a Master of Arts degree from Argosy University in Counseling Psychology.

Mrs. Jackson’s work experience includes Legislative Aide to former Assemblyman Robert (Bob) J. Campbell; Executive Director of Neighborhood House of North Richmond; Counselor (11th Street Methadone Clinic), Adjunct Faculty, and presently Marketing & Communications coordinator at Contra Costa College.

Mrs. Jackson has produced several teen teleconferences aired live on cable television. Topics include, “How Young Is Prostitution;” “Have You Seen My Baby’s Daddy?,” “187 Not The Answer,” and “Out Of The Mix: I’m Feeling Depressed.”

Mrs. Jackson is a community advocate for youth issues, social justice and closing the educational achievement gap for African American males.


Staff

Paul Shain - Director
Paul Shain has been in the communications business for over 25 years as a producer/director/writer Award-winning video credits include programs for PBS, the Arts and Entertainment Channel, Disney Cable, and most Bay Area stations, He has also designed and produced multimedia programs specializing in long-distance learning and marketing for a variety of large organizations ranging from corporate clients like Sybase and Apple to government agencies such as NASA and the Centers for Disease Control. Paul has taught video and multimedia courses at San Francisco State University Multimedia Program, the Helsinki School of Business and Economics and the College of San Mateo Multimedia Studies Program and has sat on the College of San Mateo, Berkeley City College and Laney College Multimedia Advisory Committees. He has taught video to Richmond High School students and has been a member of the Richmond High School Multimedia Academy Multimedia Advisory Committee for the past five years.



Luciano Del Rio — Associate Director
Luciano Del Rio is a graduate of the Richmond Multimedia Academy. He currently works there part-time, offering mentoring and technical support for multimedia students and staff while pursuing his degree in film at San Francisco State. In that role, he has taught a variety of media skills to students for several years. He is also program coordinator for Richmond High’s Robotics Program. In addition to other programs he has created, Luciano was the executive producer for “Crossing the Line: A Journey to Awareness”, a 1/2 hour documentary that follows University of San Francisco students to Ft. Benning GA as they protest the US Army’s School of the America’s, which has a controversial role in training Central and South American paramilitary soldiers. Crossing the Line is distributed nationally by the School of the America’s Watch as a tool to educate high school students about the issues surrounding the School of the America’s.



Anthony Owens-Williams
Anthony Owens-Williams has served as Artist in Residence at Richmond High since 1990. His focus is on creative collaboration engaging the arts and education. Anthony began his acting career in 1967 with the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco; studied with theater historians in New York City; and produced a musical production with Oscar Brown Jr. He completed his first film in 1969 and began introducing film and video to theater personnel, where he discovered his primary focus: using video media to tell personal stories. His use of video to present the uniqueness of one’s own personal story is reflected in his ongoing work with Richmond youth.